Business strategy and healthcare

Is Statewide Single-Payer Feasible, or Is It Just ‘California Dreamin’?

Last week we were treated to the future with the Democrats having the new candidate and even worse, a socialist getting involved in the future of our country and especially health care, immigration, and even more. Be careful! After her victory in Tuesday’s primary election, a lot of political commentators scrambled to figure out how a young socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez managed to unseat 10-year incumbent Joe Crowley. While there are some obvious explanations, like her campaign was strong and her ideas are good, the upset has also inspired dismissiveness and hand-wringing, with Nancy Pelosi brushing off the win as just “one district” and op-eds proclaiming that “Democrats can kiss swing voters goodbye with the progressive ballot.”

But Ocasio-Cortez is aware of those critiques—in fact, she had them in mind throughout her campaign.

This may be as good an electoral policy as the Democrats have had in a long time. For decades the Democratic playbook has been to try to peel off moderate Republican voters rather than energize a working class and left-wing base, and while that could, debatably, be a sound strategy in purple districts, it doesn’t make sense in a reliably blue territory. On top of that, the insistence on always playing to the middle while the Republican Party swings further into full-blown authoritarianism has produced a huge imagination deficit among the Democrats. There have been precious few big ideas coming out of the Democratic Party, particularly ideas that voters care about, and in that vacuum, the central policies of Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, like Medicare for all and abolishing ICE, are concrete and exciting.

And on top of that, Ocasio-Cortez’s success has shown that her policies are popular. So popular that mainstream Democrats are quickly getting on board with things like abolishing ICE: this past week both Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand have publicly endorsed the position. It shouldn’t have taken a blowout election for establishment Democrats to come out against agencies literally throwing kids in cages, but it’s a big step forward from the previously most mainstream solution of throwing kids in cages along with their parents.

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign is evidence that big solutions aren’t just fantasies. As long as Democrats are too afraid or just unwilling to take stands on the deepening crises happening on fronts across the country, they have little hope of regaining real political power and even less of actually accomplishing anything.

Rich Pedroncelli wrote that California’s leading progressives are currently debating — amicably, for the moment — when the right time will arrive to destroy the state’s healthcare system.

The frontrunner in the race for the governor’s mansion, current Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, has long championed single-payer health care. But he recently softened his support. “[Single-payer] is not an act that would occur by the signature of the next governor,” he recently said. “There’s a lot of mythology about that.”

His most progressive allies — including the California Nurses Association, which has led the charge for single-payer — appear to be in more of a hurry. “To get there, state leaders must have the political will,” said Stephanie Roberson, a legislative advocate for the Association.

This debate — over when to implement single-payer — misses the point. Any single-payer system would be a disaster for California taxpayers and patients, whether it’s established tomorrow or in ten years.

California’s most recent dalliance with single-payer originated last June when the State Senate passed SB 562, the Healthy California Act. The bill would consolidate all public insurance programs — including Medicare and Medi-Cal — into a single state-run health plan. That plan would also gobble up uninsured Californians, those who buy insurance through Covered California, and the millions who currently have coverage through work.

Like most single-payer schemes, the proposed system would effectively outlaw private insurance. Public officials would determine which drugs, procedures, and services the one-size-fits-all system covers. Care would be free at the point of service. Californians would pay no premiums, deductibles, or co-pays, and referrals to specialists would not be necessary.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon ultimately rejected SB 562 as “woefully incomplete,” since it included no funding mechanism. But to pacify progressives, he formed a special commission, grandly titled the “Assembly Select Committee on Health Care Delivery Systems and Universal Coverage,” to further study single-payer.

The Committee heard more than 30 hours of testimony before releasing a report authored by an independent healthcare consultant and professors from the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, San Diego. That report essentially concluded that implementing single-payer would be impossible in the short term.

Among the reasons? It’d cost about $400 billion. That’s more than double California’s entire annual budget.

In theory, the state could cover about half that total by poaching federal funding from existing public insurance programs, such as Medicare and Medi-Cal. But as the report points out, that would require a federal waiver — one the Trump administration almost certainly wouldn’t grant.

Even if Democrats retake the White House in 2020 and grant California a waiver, the state would still have to come up with $200 billion to fund the single-payer system. Senate leaders have floated a 15 percent payroll tax.

A study conducted by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, economist Robert Pollin on behalf of the California Nurses Association claims that the state would only need to raise an additional $106 billion in revenue.

And even if those wildly optimistic projections are correct, California would still have to raise taxes significantly. The nurses’ study suggests an additional 2.3 percent sales tax — on top of the existing 7.25 percent levy — and an equivalent tax on business revenue.

Such enormous tax increases would drive businesses out of California. As the tax base continually shrinks, lawmakers would be forced to raise tax rates higher and higher to offset the lost revenue.

On the other side of the equation, single-payer advocates’ rosy revenue projections are predicated upon wresting significant savings out of the healthcare status quo. Practically, that means paying doctors and hospitals less — rates likely tied to Medicare or Medi-Cal, which are much lower than those paid by private insurers.

Many doctors would respond to such pay cuts by retiring early or moving to other states. Meanwhile, the best and brightest medical students would think twice about coming to California to practice. These twin outcomes would exacerbate the Golden State’s existing shortage of physicians, particularly in high-need areas.

Publicly funded health care for all sure sounds good. But the math behind single-payer doesn’t add up. And all the political will in the world can’t overcome that fact.

Canadians are one in a million — while waiting for medical treatment

Sally Pipes wrote that Canada’s single-payer healthcare system forced over 1 million patients to wait for necessary medical treatments last year. That’s an all-time record.

Those long wait times were more than just a nuisance; they cost patients $1.9 billion in lost wages, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think-tank.

Lengthy treatment delays are the norm in Canada and other single-payer nations, which ration care to keep costs down. Yet more and more Democratic leaders are pushing for a single-payer system — and more and more voters are clamoring for one.

Indeed, three in four Americans now support a national health plan — and a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that health care is the most important issue for voters in the coming election.

The leading proponent of transitioning the United States to a single-payer system is Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s firebrand independent. If Sanders and his allies succeed, Americans will face the same delays and low-quality care as their neighbors to the north.

By his own admission, Sen. Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill is modeled on Canada’s healthcare system. On a fact-finding trip to Canada last fall, Sanders praised the country for “guaranteeing health care to all people,” noting that “there is so much to be learned” from the Canadian system.

The only thing Canadian patients are “guaranteed” is a spot on a waitlist. As the Fraser report notes, in 2017, more than 173,000 patients waited for an ophthalmology procedure. Another 91,000 lined up for some form of general surgery, while more than 40,000 waited for a urology procedure.

All told, nearly 3 percent of Canada’s population was waiting for some kind of medical care at the end of last year.

Those delays were excruciatingly long. After receiving a referral from a general practitioner, the typical patient waited more than 21 weeks to receive treatment from a specialist. That was the longest average waiting period on record — and more than double the median wait in 1993.

Rural patients faced even longer delays. For instance, the average Canadian in need of orthopedic surgery waited almost 24 weeks for treatment — but the typical patient in rural Nova Scotia waited nearly 39 weeks for the same procedure.

One Ontario woman, Judy Congdon, learned that she needed a hip replacement in 2016, according to the Toronto Sun. Doctors initially scheduled the procedure for September 2017 — almost a year later. The surgery never happened on schedule. The hospital ran over budget, forcing physicians to postpone the operation for another year.

In the United States, suffering for a year or more before receiving a joint replacement is unheard of. In Canada, it’s normal.

Canadians lose a lot of money waiting for their “free” socialized medicine. On average, patients forfeit over $1,800 in lost wages. And that’s only counting the working hours they miss due to pain and immobility.

The Fraser Institute researchers also calculated the value of all the waking hours that patients lost because they couldn’t fully function. The toll was staggering — almost $5,600 per patient, totaling $5.8 billion nationally. And those calculations ignore the value of uncompensated care provided by family members, who often take time off work or quit their jobs to help ill loved ones.

Canada isn’t an anomaly. Every nation that offers government-funded, universal coverage features long wait times. When the government makes health care “free,” consumers’ demand for medical services surges. Patients have no incentive to limit their doctor visits or choose more cost-efficient providers.

To prevent expenses from ballooning, the government sets strict budget caps that only enable hospitals to hire a limited number of staff and purchase a meager amount of equipment. Demand inevitably outstrips supply. Shortages result.

Just look at the United Kingdom’s government enterprise, the National Health Service, which turns 70 this July. Today, British hospitals are so overcrowded that doctors regularly treat patients in hallways. The agency recently canceled tens of thousands of surgeries, including urgent cancer procedures, because of severe resource shortages. And this winter, nearly 17,000 patients waited in the backs of their ambulances — many for an hour or more — before hospital staff could clear space for them in the emergency room.

Most Americans would look at these conditions in horror. Yet Sen. Sanders and his fellow travelers continue to treat the healthcare systems in Canada and the UK as paragons to which America should aspire.

Sen. Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal would effectively ban private insurance and force all Americans into a single, government-funded healthcare plan. According to Sen. Sanders, this new insurance scheme would cover everything from regular check-ups to prescription drugs and specialty care, no referral needed — all at no charge to patients.

Americans shouldn’t fall for these rosy promises. As Canadians know all too well, when the government foots the bill for healthcare, patients are the ones who pay the biggest price.

Most Californians support single-payer unless they have to pay for it

Maybe Californians really are tired of paying so much in taxes. But Sal Rodriquez found that according to a recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California, 53 percent of likely voters support the idea of a single-payer health care system in California, but support falls to just 41 percent if single-payer would require new taxes, which it will.

About two-thirds of Democrats support the idea of a single-payer system even if it means higher taxes – because to be a Democrat in California is apparently to firmly believe that the inept government in Sacramento deserves more of everyone’s hard-earned money.

According to the survey, the Bay Area is the only region in the state where a majority of likely voters support a single-payer system even if it means higher taxes, but even then it’s just 55 percent of them. Majorities of likely voters in the Central Valley and Orange/San Diego Counties outright oppose a single-payer plan, and almost half (47 percent) of Inland Empire likely voters also oppose the idea.

It should be absolutely clear that a single-payer plan will necessarily entail higher taxes and there’s no way around it.

A California Senate Rules Committee analysis of SB562, a single-payer bill which remarkably passed the state Senate despite not actually offering an actual plan, noted that “about $200 billion in additional tax revenues would be needed to pay for the remainder of the total program cost.”

For context, total estimated general fund revenues for 2018-19 for state government is just over $140 billion.

So, yeah, single-payer will require enormous tax hikes. Considering that most Californians already believe they pay more in taxes than they should and that the state can barely manage everything it does now, single-payer is a fanciful idea that shouldn’t be seriously contemplated at this time.

Kimberly Leonard of the Washington Examiner reported that outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been criticized by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., over his comments on a healthcare system fully funded by the government. (Reuters)

Liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders says outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is “dead wrong” for saying that moving to a health care system fully funded by the government isn’t realistic.

The Vermont independent, who has been pressing for the U.S. to move toward socialized medicine, was asked to respond to comments Schultz made about the plan in another interview.

Schultz recently announced that he would be leaving Starbucks and said he was considering “public service.” He said on CNBC he was concerned about the way “so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders said Medicare-for-all is a “cost-effective” program. (AP)

“And I ask myself, how are we going to pay for all these things? In terms of things like single-payer or people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job, I don’t think that’s realistic,” he said.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Sanders about the possibility of Schultz running as “the Left’s Trump” who may go up against the current president in 2020.

Sanders said he didn’t know Schultz but his comment was “dead wrong.”

“You have a guy who thinks that the United States apparently should remain the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people,” Sanders said. “The truth of the matter is that I think study after study has indicated that Medicare for All is a much more cost-effective approach toward health care than our current, dysfunctional health care system, which is far and away the most expensive system per capita than any system on Earth.”

I think the Bernie is a nut socialist but he may be correct in this situation. However, Medicare for All is also questionable and I can’t believe these candidates suggesting that they as governors can change a federal law or system. And also remember what free borders for illegal immigrants mean to a health care system. Who is going to pay for all those illegal immigrants needing health care? Be careful what you wish for!!